An Interesting Application for Magnets

An Interesting Application for Magnets

By: Will Griffith

Reviewed By: Jimmy Apablaza, Jason Osborne

Science fiction has sparked many great ideas. Satellites for example were first thought of in some sicence fiction stories. Specificaly communication satalites were first theorized by Arthur C. Clarke and later were found to truly be possible. Not everything theorized in science fiction can become a reality. A good example is Jack Williamson's story "The Metal Man." In this story a scientist studies a location riddled with radiation. The cave is riddled with strange crystalline creatures and structures. He tries to escape but before he can reach home the effects of the radiation turn his body into metal. As of now no known form of radiation could cause this, and it is unlikely that any would. Still at the time radiation was not understood and so this author came up with a possible idea of something radiation can do. still can give use good stepping stones in the right direction, and often expand our thinking to realms that we would have never dreamed of going. In our discussion of magnetic circuits I am reminded of an idea I derived from a science fiction book. My idea comes from Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451. In this book there are firemen and in there fire station they have a fire-poll. This is no ordinary poll though. This fire-pole can go not only down up it can take its rider up. This got me thinking one day about how someone could do this. I started thinking about Maglev trains and how they work. For propulsion the rail changes part of it's magnetic field to pull the front of the train forward and push the back of the train the same direction. It also levitates the train above the rail so there is hopefully no friction involved. Well this concept could be applied to a fire-pole. You could just make the main pole magnetic and then hook an apparatus too it. This could either just be something you gripped, or better something you could grip and a place to put one or both feet. Realistically this would be impractical energy wise, it would be better to use conventional elevators or just the stairs. But still this would be amazing to see.

Figure 1. This is a concept design I made in Pro-E.

(This article was submitted for review 1-7-10 at 10:30pm).

I am making a video too but it wont be up untell later and so I will just submit it individually then.